Human beings have been domesticated like cattle over millennia by insidious and ruthless predator-parasites who easily walk among us. Their predatory nature has been largely sanitised and camouflaged by centuries of our begrudging tolerance and cowardly acceptance. Almost all of our great institutional ideas have been adjusted, perverted, corrupted and even radically transformed into environments that greatly favour their ways and tactics.

Economics, governance, education, welfare, health, are now little more than facades of their original ideals filled with processes of entrapment, exploitation and frustration of potential that are working solely to empower and enrich the predators who control them.

Now through the focus of a number of researchers, these predators are coming to light and being described as "successful psychopaths" -- they are composed of the majority of 5% of humanity, who have successfully avoided being diagnosed clinically and have not been apprehended during criminal and immoral activities and then institutionalised.

The "ways" of the psychopath are simplistic and become easy to observe when we finally learn to see "the wood for the trees" and we learn that many of our critical social and economic "givens" are in fact evolutionary artefacts of the influences that psychopaths have had on our cultures and societies for millennia.

They have told us that, like domestic cattle, we need their fences (controls) and their oversight (surveillance) to protect us from the wolves (or terrorists) that would come and decimate us and our little ones and we have been told that the world is a terrible hostile place and that life is fraught with adversaries, a self--fulfilling prophecy when societies and cultures are governed by psychopaths. Their measures are in reality to make us defensive, terrorised and so easily influenced and ultimately such fear will intellectually infantilise us, divide us and then herd us like cattle for a more thorough and systematic control and exploitation.

The psychopath is operating cognitively at what Economics Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman called "System 1" or fast thinking, this is a cognitive template that is in place in infancy, the processes of which are situated largely within the limbic system, memory based and emotionally controlled. This type of primitive "fast and dirty" thinking when amplified through trial and error experiences is ideal for operating in chaotic and conflict based environments such as on the battlefield or in video games.

"System 2" thinking or slow thinking, on the other hand, is rational, considerate and logical, so being both analytical and constructive, it takes time. The cognitive processes of "System 2" take place largely cortically, in the areas of higher brain function and when fully evolved, utilize those higher cognitive functions acquired only through seeking mutually beneficial relationships with others and the environment. This type of advanced slow and empathetic thinking is ideal for dealing with relationships, creativity and complexity.

"System 1" or thinking "intuitively" (more like presumptuously) utilizes formulae, recipes, scenarios and scripts for actions memorized and recalled in part from past experiences or mimicked from observing the "successful" actions of others in similar circumstances. As Kahneman points out, it is fraught with impulse, assumption and error. Its ONLY real advantages are for fast reflexive responses in conflict and competitive based survival environments where immediacy is the critical factor.

Psychopaths are not just identified by their lack of empathy, conscience and their ruthless, manipulative, single-minded, narcissistic and opportunistic ways but also by their almost total lack of application of "System 2" thinking. This means that they have a severe inability to deal with complexity, the welfare of others, or with any further effects of their actions beyond their immediate self-serving objective!

To understand how psychopaths have morphologically influenced the organs of society and culture we need to be aware of those ways and thinking processes outlined above. It's not rocket science to come to the conclusion that if psychopaths want to have the continual advantage and to prevail, they must turn every type of human dealing and interaction into a virtual conflict or competition. And so creating such adversarial systems is simple but such systems are extremely unintelligent, inefficient and run on flawed structures and processes, the true costs of which, unfortunately, are borne by the rest of us and the planet, and rarely by the psychopath.

All of us, at one time or another, probably often, have personally become victims of a psychopath. In the heat of a confrontation by one, it is almost reflexive to take up a "System 1" defensive and competitive position and in doing so our empathy and sense of fairness seriously disadvantages us against the "battle" honed deviousness, ruthlessness and opportunism of the psychopath. It is even easier for the psychopath to sow, nurture and take advantage of division among family, friends, communities, committees, cultures and even countries.

The big, corrupting, ancient and perennial issue then becomes: "In a conflict or competition, wouldn't you rather have a psychopath on your side than against you?" But the end of all such situations is of course not just possible short term "gains" but an inevitable destruction and an environment of on-going conflict, both within and without.

Competition/Conflict is the life's blood of the psychopath and the ultimate psychological contagion that can only be eradicated through a clarity, understanding and then avoidance of the cyclical processes between psychopathy/sociopathy and competition as a human dynamic. Instead we must choose a different path through the conscious development of empathetic mutuality and the consequential maturation of the "System 2" thinking, creativity and complex thinking that gradually arises from such a choice.

Psychopaths and their constructs (ie corporations, political parties) need to be identified, avoided and isolated in such a manner that they have no further destructive influences over places of control, or critical decision-making. Competition spawns few winners and many losers, in an insidious hierarchy of exploitation. The organs of society, which have been perverted to reflect psychopathic ways and objectives should be rebuilt, eradicating competition and using our empathetically acquired higher intelligence, focused on mutual benefit with true environmental synergy and creativity as its new core.

To understand the effect of the psychopath fully, we must be aware that the retarded infantile nature of his thinking and behaviour and his incapability of creative endeavour, keeps him in an infantile dependent state. He can only take, or be given what he needs and desires, so he focuses greatly on his infantile skills of manipulating others to meet his needs. He does this in a way that is amplified and sophisticated by many years of trial and error experience at "pushing people's emotional buttons" using the emotional tactics of seduction, rejection and menace in all their variations.

Unfortunately the psychopath's attributes of control are uniquely successful in divisive competitive environments like politics and economics, where whole populations have been both intellectually and empathetically suppressed in their development through the cradle to the grave application of competition. For most of us, in order to compete, we have been coerced into attempting to apply seriously faulty "System 1" thinking to every aspect of our lives, literally "in the heat of battle" and as a result have abandoned our fertile and complex cognitive potentials.

Education has now been perverted to where its major function is to prepare us for employment in very competitive environments under the direction of psychopaths or their processes and so, by default, pedagogy focuses on the simplistic and "quick and dirty" System 1" limbic memory based cognitive template and the competitive tactics of the psychopath. It is further based on the unspoken assumption that working life is about taking instruction from authorities in the form of recipes, formulae, scripts and scenarios, remembering them in detail and then following them accurately to get the result the instructor demanded.

The price we pay for an education based almost entirely on system1 thinking is that we have severely stunted our cognitive potentials to where most of us are unable to conceptualise or build our own matrixes of understanding about any subject and then going on to create integrated maps of reality. Instead we rely on supposed "authorities" like mainstream media, politicians and "accredited sources" to inform us about their values, their worldview and what they deem should be considered important in life. And these authorities are most often controlled by psychopaths.

Reader Comments

July 3, 2015 Heard 2 loud booms about 12:30am and then 1 at 1:00 a.m. Sound like someone threw something very heavy at our door. Hope its a sonic boom and not a ghost. Has happened once before late night. Is there a place where the Navy posts their past exercises?

I didn't catch that many but I was focusing on what the author was trying to convey. His ideas are what should be judged not his technical capabilities. All in all it was a great description of our experiences in this reality with our psychopathic handlers.

Are you actually aware that as a minority your US "English" is different in spelling to the real English that is spoken in the rest of the world? -- The ignorance and hubris is unbelievable -- that's if you are indeed not just provoking an argument or a defense in the copy-book fashion of the psychopathic sophistry so favoured by trolls - And no that's not another error that's actually how we spell favour in the majority of English speaking countries!

Many people struggle their entire lives with spelling and it isn't their fault nor is it correctable. The unlucky inhabitants of the public indoctrination camps were and continue to be the lab rats for experiments. There continues to be horrendous fallout from this corrupt corporate controlled and proxy operated system of public education. This so called education system is in reality designed to handicap the unfortunate victims for life with scientifically engineered programs and these begin the moment they enter the hated prison camps that they are.

To fully understand this is realize that various well meaning imbeciles/tools/agents succeeded in supplanting established forms of learning to read and write long ago in public education, and which has resulted in, among other things, people with a vocabulary of a mere 5,000 words, vers the average of 50,000 words, people who cannot spell to save their soul, and never will be able to, people who can gather and retain vast bits of information but whom cannot connect the information in to a picture, and therefore retain vast amounts of useless trivia, and obviously we now have a nation of children whom can kick soccer balls all over but whom have no other useful skills.

need a new life? Want to discover a way to overcome type1mind control? Start up your own local network of like minded freedom seekers! It's time to break the corrupt system we've been in for thousands of years! Or you could always sit on the fence (ignavi) and wait for the dust to settle. Seek the logical way forward. It exists! There is a way out of this mess. Good strong leaders needed. Are you one? Or do you prefer to follow?

System 2 needs to be put in the context of positive AND/OR negative, as both sides can 'work together', as it's their goal that defers and determines their actions. In this context then, we see that the psychopaths are puppets to 'other' masters above them in this pen full of sheep. Sheepdogs perhaps? Hard wired for these purposes of herd maintainence, for without a conscience, they haven't any qualms or need to CHOOSE. Psychopaths make very useful tools for this manipulation, sort of like those 'clone soldiers' in the Star Wars stories, they can be used by both sides, a pawn is a pawn until they are allowed to run free, or even seem to from within the pen. Like any dog in a pack, if circumstances allow, it will assume the alpha position, and when the entire system is ponerized in this manner, then all that's left to its demise. It simply cannot be fixed. It can only be destroyed like a rabid dog. The act of trying to fix it is a complete waste of time and energy, and only serves to weaken the opposition you have chosen to be. It is a useful distraction utilized against you like a maze with shifting exits, the closer you get, the further behind you become. The game is fixed by those that utilize these psychopaths, which are simply a reflection of themselves, 'as above, so below'. They seal their own fate by their actions, same as psychopaths, they can't stop their own entrophy, it is innate to their behavior.

that we may be the product of degraded intelligence. Flowers for Algernon was a product of its time when thinkers were wondering the same as this article: why the violence?
Were we degraded? Perhaps by earth gases like carbon dioxide, methane, etc? The Greek Oracle at Delphi has been described as a natural gas seep. The early Copper Age was a going concern then it collapsed to be replaced by lesser intelligent humans. What happened? What happened to Homer's golden age of Greece? Did the Med shores produce dangerous earth gases like the hydrogen that currently exists in the Black Sea bed? Are our wars the result of degraded intelligence?
Are we Flowers for Algernon?

An interesting concept, the use of psychopathy to influence and control the population by psychopaths, and through the channel of type 1 thinking necessitated by competition and conflict. However, relating this to a comment by Baron in the article concerning the Greek vote on austerity, a 1988 cover of the (Rothschild) magazine Economist pictures the Phoenix with a gold coin showing the year 2018 (indicating the genesis of a new gold based currency, and the death of the fiat currency system which seems likely.) In my opinion this indicates a type of long term thinking and ability to plan far ahead which would be impossible for the psychopath using the type 1 thinking. Does this indicate that the psychopath is an intermediary carrying out orders from a more advanced intelligence?

Does the psychopath have a more advanced intelligence giving him orders -- I believe the answer is no - there seems to be a sort of blanket adoption of various tactics deemed to be successful in achieving their impulses that can look like a directed collusion but its mostly mimicking - once a psychopathic meme gets out its quickly adopted ie "austerity" compare the governments of UK, Canada, Australia?

Higher cognitive functions or "slow thinking" (system2) is acquired partly through seeking and valuing relationships that are mutually beneficial and so is about making a variety of rational connections between things, this gives us the ability to deal beneficially with complexity.So if there were a "higher intelligence" at work- it could only be benevolent - the phenomenon you may be witnessing I think is probably a form of "hive mind"

This is fantastic. This article puts the Psychopathy/Ponerology paradigm that we're all victim's of in a different perspective than I've seen before that helps open up the depth of the problem and the requirements of the solutions in fresh ways to my understanding. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much Yossarian, - it is indeed my aim to create a new lense with which to view the disturbing state of human interaction as portrayed by the psychopath -- Smacking them down for every breach of morality won't work -- they are used to it -- we need to go to the real issue -- its about cognition empathy and behaviour and creating a society where unlike the present where it is fundamentally psychopathic and competitive with the rest of us trying desperately to tweak and correct it, We should be creating a society based on mutual benefit through developing empathy, creativity and higher cognition and consciously blocking it being corrupted by the infantile psychopathic mind.

It seems to me that whoever wrote this article assumes that people are born psychopathic, and that psychopathic = evil. It sits uneasily with me personally because I have aspergers, and the traits are very similar from the outside perspective, in terms of social and empathic stuff, and to do with intelligence and learned behaviour. From what I have learned, psychopathy is when someone is completely disconnected from their heart and their emotions, whether through trauma and abuse in early childhood, or through mind conditioning like with the elites, to systematically disconnect people from 'feeling' through complete and utter fear and learned helplessness. So from that fear comes a need for control and the ability and desire to manipulate people either emotionally or through their actions as a way of surviving a world that the psycho/sociopath sees as an overwhelming and scary place, and often because of what has been done to them see nothing wrong with inflicting pain and suffering on others. However, this doesn't take into account that we have two halves of the brain, our emotional centre is on the right, and our action centre is on the left. Right brain dominant people, of which I am one, are often ruled by my emotions. When the bridge between the two sides of the brain is broken, it can not only create bipolar disorder, but can create psychopathy, as the individual can become dominated by the left brain and be completely disconnected from their emotions and their heart. They can't feel. Having been through a fair amount of trauma and met some bona fide psychopaths in my time, my initial response is not fear and hate, but empathy. Why are they like that? What can we do to help them? It is quite typical of left brain thinking to suggest we lock them all up and pretend they're not there. It stops us as a race from dealing with the source of the problem, which usually seems to be systemic child abuse and conditioning. Sort that out, create a more loving and kinder world, and we collectively will find our world will stop being ruled by crazy people.

Yes, I'm aware of the similarities to Asperger's, and thank you for sharing that information because it offers a unique perspective which I will endeavor to remember. However, what I hope to illustrate is that there is a divergence between characteristics in the pathology of the disease not well recognized.

Throughout time there have been psychopaths. The legends of Werewolves and other monsters supplanted the vacuum of real knowledge. These evident mindless murderers which we, today, know as the works of psychopaths isn't in itself an adequate explanation for the activities of the rulers. Therefore, the psychopathic like application of, and implementation of designs, politically, socially, or by other means are not of the same cloth. That is, they are not "necessarily" motivated by the same mentality as that of someone who derives pleasure from a physical act.

Nature has always been the first teacher, and what nature taught the over-lords of society is that nature consists of 98% of creatures are preyed upon by 2%, or the predators. Nature also taught that the predators are the more intelligent because they also have free time and this free time is consequent upon their lack of need to forage for food which powers life.

Historically, philosophical notions surrounding the various functions of individuals in society were formulated to explain to the lower levels the privileges of their betters. The elites where supposedly to guide society and were tutored to be the intelligence of the society and thus afforded the luxury of their social status according to the conventional wisdom.

For a time there was a sort of understanding between the haves and the have not's called a social contract. When the social contract was broken the have not's rendered their judgement. Usually by chopping off a few heads.

After the French Revolution the old world wealth, ancient actually, contrived a means to insulate themselves.
By contraptions derived from the courtly insiders intrigues, the educated elites invented of politics, corporations, banks, and insurance companies as a way to create insularity to any further beheadings, by way of bamboozlements upon the uneducated masses. Today we have this same contraption in greater form as the veil protecting the rulers.

Thus the psychology of the elite psychopathology is born from a belief in a right to rule and a desire to maintain their status, and yes you're quite correct about the lack of empathy, but empathy comes from experience and if you never mix with the inferior beings then you cannot be expected develop any empathy, if you yourself never know the deprivations heaped upon the masses then you will never develop empathy.

The only way to develop empathy is through experience and this is exactly what they seek to avoid. To help them is to remove the barrier, and which is now so great it virtually has the US Army standing in the way now.

It may surprise you to learn, Nedlud, that there is a little bit of psychopath and sociopath in all of us. It really isn't a case of 'us' and 'them', because 'they' are human beings too. It really comes across that you hate and fear these people, but you are playing into their hands by doing so because you give them energy, and a psycho/sociopath feeds off negative attention, as you rightly point out. We are only scratching the surface of our understanding of mind body and spirit from a western perspective, and too many people avoid looking East to the mystical and look purely at the rational, the senses, and as a result we have as a species got rather lost along the way. "There is no God, only the material world, and I want more!" We all have it in us to be completely disconnected from our hearts, to be selfish and lack empathy, to manipulate, control and deceive for our own ends, and even the nicest people can still believe in competition, predatory capitalism and the march to war. The psychopaths in charge are just the same, like Baron said above, they lack empathy because they don't mix with, and look down upon, the people who they impoverish, and have a sense of their own entitlement. But really its just infantile selfishness. "You're not playing with MY toys!" But its also much much cleverer than that too. This is a game passed down for generations, that never goes away. And those who currently reside at the apex of the pyramid have, like Baron said, put in their systems of control which go back further than the french revolution and back to the merovingian dynasty. Feudalism, and its logical extensions political control, economic control and resource control, are the foundation of the craziness we are seeing in our world. And those who feel no empathy will do anything not to lose what they have, and try to gain more.